Page 84 of Our Strange Duet

He rubbed his cheek, and I recalled the crack of my hand. “You’re much stronger than you look,” he said with a rueful smile.

“Oh, darling,” I said, and fell over myself trying to inspect the damage. “I feel horrible. I was caught in the worst nightmare.”

“I guessed.” He sat back, squinting at me, and I was stunned to see how his cheekbone had already begun to swell and redden.

I reached out to cup his face, then thought better of it, unsure of what to do, and my fingers fluttered uselessly to my lap. “I knew it was a dream, even as it was happening, but I couldn’t break myself away from it.”

“It sounded awful,” he said, and wrapped an arm around my shoulders, pulling me close to his bare chest. I tried to snuggle against him, tried to release the last of my terror, but my limbs felt restless as the muscles clung to their adrenaline, wanting to fight or flee. “You were whimpering and then started to shout, but I couldn’t understand anything you were saying. You sounded so scared.”

“I was.” My eyes grew wet, and I rubbed them, wishing I could clear my mind as easily as I could the tears.

“Do you remember any of it?” he asked, tracing gentle circles across my back. “Sometimes it helps to talk it over.”

I scrunched my eyes shut, trying to picture how everything had played out. “I was…I was onstage, at the Populaire,” I began, my words soft and halting. “It was just like the night the chandelier fell, only…” I glanced up and saw him nod encouragingly. “Only, I was all alone. There was no one with me. Only…only him.”

Raoul made a sound of sympathy. “I can see why it upset you so.”

I nuzzled closer to him, deepening our embrace. Here, with Raoul holding me, the terrors I’d experienced seemed worlds away. Here, it didn’t matter if Erik was alive or dead. He was a moment of my past that could not touch me in this present. Not while I was with Raoul. Not while he kept me safe.

I remembered stepping out onto the stage, hearing my footsteps on the boards, feeling the vast emptiness of the house before me.

Would I ever be able to do that again without first thinking of him? Without worrying that he was still there, lurking in the shadows, waiting to exact his revenge?

Raoul could keep me safe here, in this grand château, miles from Paris, but the opera had always, always belonged to Erik.

Meg had said that the managers believed him dead, but what did they know? They’d never seen him—not as I had. They didn’t understand how resourceful he was, how resilient he could be. They didn’t comprehend his capacity to go after what he wanted.

But I did.

I knew that once Erik’s attention had been captivated, nothing would stop him, maybe not even death.

Do I look like a ghost to you?

I did not doubt that if it was possible for a spirit to linger beyond the grave, Erik was now truly haunting the Opéra Populaire.

But if, as I feared, he had survived…

I shuddered.

“It’s all right,” Raoul murmured, his lips brushing against my temple. “You’re safe now. The dream can’t hurt you.”

The dream might not be able to, but Erik, in whatever form he now took, could.

You will curse the day you did not do all that the Phantom asked of you!

Be he dead or alive, his voice lingered in my mind, slithering and insistent and impossible to escape from.

“What if…” I began, unsure I had the fortitude to finish the idea. I bit my lip, drumming up the courage to throw it out anyway, to test the waters and see what Raoul thought of it. “What if I didn’t go back to singing?”

Raoul shifted to better study me, a frown marring his face. “At the Populaire?”

“Anywhere,” I said, trying out the grandiose idea to see how it felt.

“Oh, Christine, surely the dream wasn’t as bad as all that.”

“It wasn’t just the dream.”

Was it?